"Ice" Part of the Sarkis Film Series at SFAI October 17, 2006

In conjunction with the exhibition, SARKIS: ALIVE AND AFTER, SFAI will host a series of free public film screenings in the Lecture Hall. The films, selected by Sarkis as those that have influenced his practice, include Wang Bing's rarely screened 10-hour film Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks. The film screening dates are as follows, all screenings take place at 7:30pm unless otherwise noted: The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (October 3); The Color of Pomegranates, Sergei Paradjanov (October 10); Ice, Robert Kramer (October 17); Stalker, Andreï Tarkovski (October 24); 1+1 (Sympathy for the Devil), Jean-Luc Godard (October 31); Tie Xi Qu: West of Tracks (Saturday & Sunday, November 4 & 5, 11am-2pm, 2:30pm-5:30pm, 7pm-10pm); The Seasons, Artavazd Pelechian (TBA).

Free and Open to the Public

"Ice"
U.S., 1969
"Ice to me is the most original and most significant American narrative film in...years. I like its slow, measured flow, which is mysterious, unpredictable, full of dark corners....I like its movements, its people, its mood. The film probes in depth the most urgent contemporary realities. Robert Kramer is a filmmaker of the first magnitude." (Jonas Mekas, Village Voice) Sometime in the future, an underground revolutionary organization plans the first stage of a guerrilla struggle. Part sci-fi, part thriller, part study/part exposé of the politics of radicalism, and "shot with a grainy, frightening immediacy, the film is....a series of vivid images of what the overthrow of the American state might look like. Comrades meet surreptitiously in safe houses; political education of the masses is held at gunpoint on apartment rooftops; training takes place on a farm in Vermont...and behind everything is the state's perverse punishment....Ice is as frightening for the sensibilities that created the film as for the tense, nightmarish qualities of the footage." (Thomas Brom, PFA '78)

Photographed by Robert Machover. With Kramer, Tom Griffen, further cast members unlisted. (135 mins, B&W)

Official Website: http://www.sfai.edu